Shroud of the Avatar leaves early access March 27th

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The past few years have been dense with reboots, remakes and Kickstarter-funded drives to return old franchises to life. When it was first announced, Shroud of The Avatar seemed like a relatively safe bet; the original mind behind the Ultima series, returning to not only dust off the singleplayer and story-driven side of the franchise, but blend it with the fondly remembered gameplay mechanics of Ultima Online.

We’ve not covered Shroud of The Avatar at all since November 2014. Now, almost five years since it first raised $2m on Kickstarter, and over three years since it first debuted on Early Access, Portalarium reckon it’s about ready for launch.

While I’ve not had the chance to try Shroud of the Avatar myself, from what I’ve seen streamed and heard on the grapevine, this one isn’t quite ready for prime-time, and may never get to that point, either. There are quite reasonable concerns about how dated the game looks, and while that is a literally superficial complaint, it’s hard to argue against the game looking a lot flatter than it should. Some of the more positive and recent Steam reviews even mention that it doesn’t run especially smoothly either.

Also worrying are reports of a multiplayer economy that vastly favours a handful of wealthy crafters, and of more particular concern is the concurrent active player-base. While I am aware that you can log in to the game directly after purchasing it from Portalarium’s own site, the fact remains that the Steam average player count (using Steamcharts’ unofficial but usually accurate figures) has been hovering around the 120-130 mark for the past 8 months. That’s not a healthy number for an online game.

It doesn’t help that the single-player side of the game bears little resemblance to Ultima (beyond having to type conversational keywords at NPCs), and just looks more like an MMO without other players. Complaints abound regarding the optional cash-shop that the game is using to provide yet another layer of funding, with many plots of land for player housing requiring real money in order to buy a deed to them. It’s not the best of signs, really.

Shroud of the Avatar is currently £31/$40, although the price may yet increase on March 27th. You’re probably best off at least playing the free trial before diving in to something potentially regrettable. We’ll hopefully have a full review, or at least some hands-on impressions ready at launch, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that this one has fallen far short of its potential.

I wish I could share that opinion, but while Divinity does some things that Ultima VII did, and better than U7 at that, for me it completely fails at others, namely creating a living, breathing society. (I haven’t yet played DOS2, though, which may do this better than the first game.) In that respect I actually think that RPGs like the Bethesda ones and open world games like the Assassin’s Creed games or Rockstar’s worlds come closer to what I loved about U7 (while still offering only a shadow of what U7’s Britannia achieved). If someone could combine the world design of those games with the reactivity of DOS, I’d be there in a heartbeat.

It is… but always keep the following in mind. While the Shroud team LOVE saying they’re the spiritual successor to UO, and try to appeal to those fans (even though the game was falsely Kickstarted as a single player game with optional multiplayer and not really an MMO *at all*), there’s two things against them. One, they don’t have Raph Koster, who was the real genius behind UO. And two, they’ve made a really bad game, period. No one is missing a thing by not playing it. And that’s a promise.

Oof. This reeks of death more than a plague-ridden peasant during the Black Death. I loved UO back in the day and I’ve followed this from an ever-increasing distance as they seem to have made poor choices at every step. A real missed opportunity I feel. Definitely not one for me.

It was on the wrong track from the start. Instead of making a successor to either UO or Ultima 4-7, they picked a kind of middle path which seemed to capture the appeal of neither.

It’s so frustrating. I look at Ultima Online (and Dwarf Fortress, and a few other games) as just the beginning of a path towards greatness, but every expedition along that path has lead to backsliding which incredibly produces a result inferior to the original.

So true everytime i feel they are so close to a ultima online type of game it’s like 1000000000000000 steps pulled backwards, I don’t get why someone can’t just emulate it into a modern setting..they keep trying to mix and match with different types of games

You suspect correctly. The Shroud team mysteriously always gloss over the fact it’s been persistent for over 500 days at this point and isn’t getting wiped. So not only are the people who get duped into trying this at “launch” going to find a very mediocre game, they’re also going to find themselves so far behind the 8-ball on progression, it’s not even funny.

Should I be worried the game is leaving early access in a little over month and yet the first thing I see on Steam page is, “WARNING: THIS GAME IS IN EARLY ACCESS. PLEASE DO NOT PURCHASE IT UNLESS YOU WANT TO ACTIVELY SUPPORT DEVELOPMENT OF THE GAME AND ARE PREPARED TO HANDLE SERIOUS ISSUES AND INCOMPLETE CONTENT. PLEASE READ THE NEGATIVE REVIEWS PRIOR”?

Honestly, I played through Ultima IX, twice. Shroud of the Avatar has little to fear from me.

Yes, you should. Check out the recent notes: link to shroudoftheavatar.com including gems like, ‘We have removed the “Under Construction” signs from all scenes in the game. Note that some scenes that are still clones or have NPCs that still need polish still have “under construction” text that will appear briefly on screen.’ In other words, uh oh, real reviewers might be showing up soon. Let’s downplay how much of this is still unfinished, over 500 days beyond persistence and, even in our own tricksy language, on the verge of “launch”. Not recommended at all.

So I checked just now on steam and I have about 50 hrs in the game. This game just isn’t fun and doesn’t deliver anything it promises, although it attempts to do so but it falls short. Also the player base is probably around that ~200 a month, but here’s the deal with those; most of them have vested thousands in real money into the game. They get all of the cool stuff, you attend their parties and get free stuff like emotes. Once you have done that plus the shitty story line, you have done everything there is to do in the game.

* It asked for $2m at Kickstarter, but video has surfaced since of Portalarium admitting they only pitched that figure to avoid immediate bankruptcy from their failed mobile games. What you see with the game today is now 4 years late, and after spending at least $20m in raised funds.

* Despite stating it wouldn’t be an MMO in the FAQ, and all the initial coverage and interviews saying it would be a Buy To Own, plot driven game like the original Ultimas, they knew at the time, and were signing deals with their Russian publisher in at least 2015 on the basis of making the game a Macro-transaction driven Free to Play MMO based around Real Money Trading.

* It is indeed a permanent F2P game now, but because they can’t control the reviews on Steam, the developers have openly slandered users there. They’ve also not put the trial accounts on that platform. This is also why they don’t update the page; they want the excuse of “Early Access” to try and avoid the negative reactions the game gets.

* You can try the game for yourself as F2P by going through their own webpage. YOU REALLY SHOULD DO THIS BEFORE RISKING MONEY ON IT.

* Portalarium announced recently they’re going to take down the Add On Store, and instead put the items for sale on the premium currency vendors, simply because the scale of RMT in the game was also putting people off. Meaning they’re trying to trick you into the game before you can honestly see what it’s REALLY built around. However…

* You CANNOT own property without a Lot Deed, and those are real money only. You either have to get it from the premium currency vendors in game, or purchase it from a player RMT. And…

* Gold trading for real money on their forums is legal too. Until recently, when I reported them to the UK Gambling commision, they were running in game Lotteries too, whilst allowing you to openly cash out your winnings on their forums.

* The game has effectively been soft launched since July 2016, when they stopped wiping the servers and allowed real money trades to begin. They’ve avoided admitting this though until now, when the money is running out again, because it’s never been up to any sort of decent standard; but after running Begathons every single month, and trying to get $2m more in Seed Invest backing, after selling their own blood, their hair and their deceased mother’s art (all true, sadly) they’ve ran out of opportunity to string it out any further, and official “Launch” and the hopes people who don’t know anything about the game buy in is the last chance the game has.

* And finally, bear in mind that not only is the community extremely small, most former backers such as myself long having abandoned the project, but it’s also SPECTACULARLY TOXIC. There are active and open attempts to manipulate public coverage, but worse than that, some of the individuals will stop at nothing to try and harm people who criticise the game because you’re getting in the way of their making money from it.

I personally have had to report to the Police 3 times in the UK, and once in Austin, Texas one particular individual who has spent more than a year now attempting to hack my accounts, and who over Christmas said my family would be raped and killed if I didn’t stop criticising the game. Unfortunately, Portalarium’s moderation is so biased towards Whale backers that even that didn’t get a response, even when the lunatic concerned was bragging he was using Portalarium’s staff to support him in his campaign of harassment. It was only when a new Community Mod, from their German partner Travian came aboard that I could get the harassment even acknowledged.

What makes it especially sickening is that this was supposed to be the spiritual successor to Ultima; a game that taught the virtues of Honesty, Sacrifice and Spirtuality; where as Shroud is a greed driven, ghastly mess of sociopaths and scammers, where “players will do anything for gold” is in the actual plot, and the only fully rounded content is the Housing market. A game where a Golden Castle costs $30,000. I wish I was making that up.

But again… it’s gone Free to Play, go and try it for yourself and see what the game is REALLY like.

It’s not so much CPU and GPU, but rather disk access speeds; you really need to run it from a Solid State Drive, because they’ve basically bought a tonne of Unity assets to re-sell, but never done much optimisation on them. It’s not GOOD on an SSD but at least it’s playable. Ish.

I tried running it on a Hard Drive recently though, and in Owls Head I was waiting 5-10 minutes for the nearby homes to pop in. This lead to a funky thing I thought was a bug due to update lag at first; clicking a public crafting table eventually lead to me teleporting there. When I asked about this, I was told no, that was deliberate, because they’d been unable to code pathfinding around these machine killing cities either, so you just auto moved to it.

Reviews when this game go live are going to be BRUTAL. And then you all get to experience the joy of what the community thinks is a reasoned response to criticising it! Ultima 7 taught the problems of blind cult belief… Baitlin won out in the long run it seems!

Sadly, it’s all true, and only maybe 10% of the shocking issues with the wider game. Have a read of the Shroud Reddits to learn more, but the fact there’s THREE active alternatives is illustrative of just how badly the project went.

There’s /r/shroudoftheavatar, which was originally controlled by a player who lost interest but wouldn’t give up the position, and allowed himself to be manipulated by the sociopath stalking critics, and the RMTs endlessly reporting anyone against the game to try and get them silenced; it drove off most of the informed comment and degenerated into just endless threats over Christmas against myself and my family. After that happened, Reddit (who I was in contact with because of the legal action against the sociopath) forced the old Mod out, and the new one briefly considered shutting the sub down entirely.

In the short term, Portalarium tried to set up their own contrasting sub, at /r/SotA_Official, but as you can see, it’s largely dead except for the Alts of RMTs in game. The actual game itself really doesn’t have an audience, although it also didn’t help that Portalarium pre-emptively banned all the critics before opening their own sub. Yes, really.

The critics who in turn had fallen foul of the endless gaslighting of the old Mod moved over to /r/shroudoftheavatar_raw/ where they could speak more freely. Said sub is also been bombarded by endless sockpuppets of the sociopaths, but remains largely healthy because people are free to respond openly too; but especially because someone who apparently writes for PCGames.de copies all their coverage to Raw, and feeds what is said there back into his reporting.

There’s also 2 OTHER subs, one set up by a toxic RMT called “ShroudOfTheAvatarNice” when he thought the original was about to be closed, and one critical “SotA_Unofficial” which didn’t take off like Raw did.

So remember this when the positive Steam reviews try to tell you the community is the best thing about the game…

Note the sock puppet that made an account just to brag about the profiteering opportunities, and then to link to a video by an individual who has a Patreon set up to ask for money to pay for his videos that advertise his RMT business in game… and the only reward is he’ll set up an in game Lottery, so you’re ALSO paying for the prizes in said Lottery, whilst he gets to sell the gold that the tickets will cost in game.

And Chris Spears, one of the Devs, immediately gets his first post deleted, calls everyone criticising the game “Trolls” and then literally makes up a claim no one ever said; whilst I take care to remind him that under his prior account, which he had to abandon on Reddit because he got so unprofessional, he openly mocked my complaints about harassment.

Do come to the Raw sub-reddit where we archive and document all of the astounding unprofessional behaviour and outright immoral activities associated with the game. There’s a REASON the balance of commentary is extremely negative. And why the game had to go F2P before it even launched.

I’m sad about this. Ultimas 6 & 7 are my absoloute favourite games of all time (joint because I can’t decide between them). The only reason I didn’t immediately back this on Kickstarter is because I couldn’t afford it at the time, although I bought it as soon as I could. But it’s really really poor. I’ve had no fun with it, the combat is dull, it in no way feels like any of the Ultima games that came before it. I’m aware EA have the licence so it could never have been an actual Ultima game but an up to date version of those amazing isometric RPG’s would have made me so happy, even if it wasn’t as good as the original series. That has basically been done with Divinity anyway, but I can’t help pining for what we didn’t get.

I’m a huge fan of kickstarter; it’s great for the games market, and I keep on finding out that games I enjoy ran a kickstarter. That said, the success rate is much lower for MMOs. I’ve been watching this, the pathfinder MMO, and City of Titans with dismay.

The two just aren’t well suited for one another. First of all, MMOs tend to be more expensive on the whole than almost any other genre of game to develop, much less have any chance of competing with the current popular MMOs. It’s nearly unheard of for a videogame Kickstarter project to raise even as much as $5,000,000 and that really isn’t MMO money, historically speaking. Secondly, MMOs have ongoing operation and development costs, unlike most other videogame genres. Kickstarter is a one time infusion of money. So either you’re paying to have the chance to pay more money, or they turn off the money spigot from their most dedicated supporters and have to figure out some way to monetize the random public. Neither is exactly an exciting prospect to me as a potential backer. Finally, of course, MMOs live or die on playerbase. Even big publisher ones with real budgets have trouble attracting much of a crowd anymore. A Kickstarted one is likely to have a small, fanatical playerbase at very best. And that’s often a recipe for insularity and toxicity.

Look up Portalariums failed mobile game Ultimate Collector and then smush it in with Ultima Online and the baby will be Shroud of the Avatar. Ultimate Collector failed miserably and Richard Garriot really liked the idea of it and decided he could fool his already established Ultima Fanbase into it if he added a bit of Ultima into it.

Only this is not Ultima.

Portalarium added a new mail system into the game not too long ago, they had the fancy cash shop ones all ready to go for the system launch but couldn’t be bothered to have the plain crappy crafted ones finished in time. So in order to use the new mail system you had to open your wallet or wait a month or so for them to patch in the plain ones. This is just an example of how this company works. Cash shop first, actual game third. Why third? Well, because thinking of ways to scam people is second.

Portalrium actually made money off Richard Garriots mother’s death. They created an in-game painting, and put it up for sale on the cash shop and only donated a small percentage to her favorite charity. The rest went into Ports pocket.

For launch, they will be scaling back on the amount of items in the cash shop so that prospective players won’t think the game is all about the cash shop. Well they are right, it’s 50/50 between RMT and cash shop. Every decision they make is based on milking whales/players and how best to maximize RMT.

In fact players on logging in on launch will find advertising in game directing them where to go in order to do RMT. Note in backpack and/or notices in game. Talk about immersion breaking.

Game is the epitome of P2W. Then you may ask how do you win in SotA, well that is up to the player really. Do you want a house? Want have the best armor and weapons? Don’t want to actually level your character? Well you can buy everything by opening your wallet.

Use cash to buy weapons and armor? Check
Use cash to buy a house plot? Check
Use cash to pay someone to power level your character? Check
Use cash to buy the best decorations? Check

This game is not Ultima Online, this game is not reminiscent of the old Ultima games.

Black Desert Online was made with a similar budget as SotA and was made with a custom engine. SotA uses Unity and relies on store bought assets which they do minimal work on then flip in their cash shop. They rely on plugins made by other people, then ditch them when Unity is updated and they can’t figure out how to fix the plugin to work with the new update.

It’s a great game, many of us sink huge amounts of time into it. Thankfully the combat really improved this last year, turning into some of the deepest I’ve seen. You can customize your build in a huge number of ways.

There are tons of recipes to craft, the in game economy is fun to participate in and try to ride. Things change all the time.

There’s a free trial if you feel like giving it a shot. If you are in the area of Resolute, swing by S Mart Factorium, I’m probably there crafting furniture and putting it in the showroom. My vendors will buy your raw materials, or you can craft components and sell them to them. It’s a good way to get your feet under you when starting.

Everything I want to say about this game has been said by better people than me, but I heartily agree. I backed this game, genuinely tried to like it but it’s horrid and nothing like UO or any other Ultima game in my humble opinion. If I could get a refund I would.

It was kickstarted as single player game you can play with friends and that it was not an MMO. Shortly after kickstarter it changed to a full blown MMO. Backers had no say in this. They would still have an offline mode, they just wouldn’t do any work on it.

I recently went back and tried to play the game again…I didn’t last too long as it wasn’t much fun to play.

The storyline in this game is bad, shockingly bad. You talk to an NPC and the writing is at the level of a fanfiction, walls of boring and meaningless text that sometimes doesn’t even make sense anymore since they changed that part of the game. You have zero effect on the storyline or how it changes the game world.

Graphics are a mixed bag, they use a lot of unity assets that they spiff up a bit. Some of the new scenes look good but it all has a dated look to it. Basic things like elevators for instance look janky.

RMT is a huge problem along with the community, both play a large part in how things unfold in changes to the game. Currently they have a bunch of very high players who got there by using systems that were not ready when the game went live over a year ago(yes that is a thing) They earned a mass amount xp that no new players can mimic. They have players like that who now charge real money to level you up by letting you syphon xp as he adventures(supported by the company).

There will be a few posters here who label anyone who disagrees with them trolls, even one of the main devs, I would caution giving them much time. Some have even gone to great lengths to stalk and harass anyone who says anything about the game.

You can try the game…you will see it is so far behind the games it said it wanted to be a spiritual successor(ultima, UO) and how far behind anything that is out now. Play divinity instead…or basically anything.

If you’re on the fence just try it and see what you think. Shroud has a lot to offer and you’re more than likely going to come out ahead for hours played compared to what you spend for the game itself. Only you will be able to decide if you like it. Don’t let the opinions of the lovers and the haters sway giving it a legitimate shot.

I’ve noticed there’s a small mob of players that like to go around to every single thread out there and bash the game. I’ve also noticed that while some of the concerns they have and reasons for being upset are legit and acceptable, they are also regurgitating a lot of angst that has built up over the years of fighting with the player base on many platforms. A lot of these players stopped playing quite some time ago and aren’t even current, thus causing them to have complaints on things that don’t even exist anymore.

On the flip side, there are people who view the game as sacred who are a bit out of touch with some of the issues it has also. Everything considered, this has fueled a bit of a tit for tat mentality between the community and the people who have defected.

Don’t get caught up in all of that.

This game has progressed quite a bit over even the last 2-3 months. Next release it will change even more, including a huge addition to combat trees.

Greetings everyone! This is Starr Long, Executive Producer on Shroud of the Avatar. Thank you so much for your interest in the project. We definitely want everyone to gather as much information about the project before making a purchase decision including trying the Free Trial. If you ever have any questions or concerns about our policies, project methodologies, game designs, etc. please feel free to post in our official forums or contact us directly at support@portalarium.com.

It is worth noting that we have been the target of an organized campaign for the last several years by a group of individuals who post on every website, review, social media, etc. that mentions or features the game. This group spreads misinformation, takes information out of context, presents incomplete information, etc. in an effort to damage the game and sway opinion against the project. So please use caution when viewing “facts” from certain sources.

Do you know what’s the worst thing about your project Starr Long? Not only are you unable to accept the negative reviews are because you deliberately deceived your kickstarter backers about what you intended to make, but to make excuses for that, you have to project your own manipulative and organised behavior with regards to warping public perception onto the critics.

In 2015 you were already trying to do this with the Steam reviews yourself in your own newsletters.

The not so good news is that some of them are giving us bad reviews. Just recently we dropped from Very Positive to Mostly Positive. Long term this will decrease the number of people who purchase our product on Steam and therefore will mean we will have less money to build this world we all want.””

Your own community openly organises further manipulation on the forums; he may have had the post censored since, but “VladamirBegemot” above has a thread active calling for all this coverage to be bombarded with positive comments right now, doesn’t he? Which is HOW you knew to come here, isn’t it?

When Chris Spears tried to push the claim that the critics were as organised as you are on Reddit, it wasn’t enough to just tell that lie, you had to try and claim you had proof just like we have to archive all your public statements…

Only I publicly bet him $40 that I’d spend on a new account, and I’d give to a player who wanted the game if he actually had it. Because we know damn well we’re not organised and no such evidence exists.

But once more, I’ll tell you why I’m so determined to correct the actual record; in my own personal case, because I tried to ask for the game I backed at Kickstarter, you allowed harassment against me from within the community to escalate to the point I had to go to the police multiple times, and even NOW you’re still covering for the individual who is doing it because he has so much money invested in the game.

The earlier Ultimas taught Honesty and virtuous behaviour. Your current game is built so greedy scammers can use it to run Real Money businesses. You are prepared to even lie about your partner BlackSun and deny you told them in 2015 the long term plan was to go Free to Play because you didn’t want the negative public perception spotting that would bring. But you still wanted the money F2P would bring in.

The only unity your critics have is because they’re uniformly disgusted with what their childhood heroes have become, and what you took their money and made with it.

Bottom line, we have a free trial. Ignore the negativity that a few VERY dedicated fans(??) post (cut and paste style) on every single story on our game on every website and go play the game yourself.

For the person who posts on every single thread on every website that we said we said we were a single player game in KickStarter, I think you must have your facts wrong. Let me help you! Here is what we said on KS. Reminder, no KS can edit their page once the campaign ends.

“Shroud of the Avatar general features:
From Lord British’s Treatise on “What is an Ultimate RPG?”:
…Multiplayer Online Game – which can also be played solo player / offline”link to kickstarter.com

This is exactly what we made, an online game that can be played offline as well. Before people ask, no you can’t bring your offline character to the online game for obvious hacking reasons! Many players play exclusively in offline mode and many online players also use offline mode to test out builds for online play.

Also, reminder that only a fraction of our audience plays through steam. Our own patcher is faster and smaller unless you’re on a network that blocks torrent style traffic.

We also host a public data stream that any player can access and mine and many do and will confirm that steam is only a fraction of our audience. This is designed so player websites and can track game stats of different types and is another example of how open we are:

I’m seeing tons of posts that are super long and just go on and on and on with little to no website links to prove their case (usually from the same person). Just ignore the comments and go find out for yourself like you should with any game with FREE accounts.

Go get a FREE account and start playing for FREE. If you like the game and you are enjoying yourself – consider upgrading your account.

DONE – Simple – Period and to the point.

Everything else does not matter at the end of the day as long as you are enjoying your time because time is an investment you can never recover.

Look me up ingame – my character name is Drahcir. I’m a new player who discovered this game last month. I was not a backer or anything else because I didn’t know about this game until now. I am an old Ultima Online beta tester and long time player even after beta. I am from Chesapeake – St Drahcir was the name from the old guild Saints of Britannia.